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New and Expanded Campus Actions

Thanks in part to the arrival in April of Meg Bossong ’05, the college’s first director of sexual assault prevention and response, the college has been able to move forward significantly in its ongoing work to address and eliminate sexual assault at Williams. Below are some of the new or expanded efforts that took place in the fall of 2014.

The Rape and Sexual Assault Network (RASAN) trained new members and other interested students, and began working with an expanded number of student groups to refresh its poster campaign across campus.

The Women’s Collective brought to campus Tatyana Fazlalizedeh and her public art project “Stop Telling Women to Smile.”

Students participated in a national day of action as part of the movement Carry That Weight.

The Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness group met biweekly to advance several of the initiatives listed here.

Meg Bossong worked with various student groups, at their request, to discuss consent, bystander intervention, and related topics.

The JAs and RASAN, working with Meg Bossong, jointly revised and facilitated bystander and consent training for all entries during First Days. Transfer students and graduate students in Art History and the CDE participated in similar programming.

The Athlete-Driven Initiative Against Sexual Assault facilitated conversations about sexual assault prevention and response among members of various teams.

Student affairs staff were trained in handling incidents of domestic and dating violence.

The college enhanced the training given to the staff who serve on adjudication panels and increased the number of staff trained.

A campus climate survey was developed for implementation at the beginning of spring semester, to be supplemented with student focus groups.

A plan was developed for implementation at the beginning of spring semester for re-evaluating our adjudication processes, inviting input from all students and staff who’ve experienced them.

Williams was the first campus to pilot the prevention app Circle of 6. The Williams version has already been downloaded more than 2,700 times (presumably by some curious faculty and staff as well as by students).

All faculty were informed of their responsibilities in how to report concerns and how to connect students who tell them about experiences of harassment or assault with the assistance they need.